Then we talked to him.
Project ARES is a multiplayer augmented reality first person shooter video game. This means that instead of looking at a computer generated virtual world as most video games create, we will overlay computer generated images on the surrounding environment. In doing so, we hope to create a more interactive video game that works with the environment instead of creating its own.
The system entails multiple pieces working together. First is the video input device. This is so the computer can see what is happening in the world and can react to it as programmed. Second is the video output device. This is so that the user can see both the real world and the computer generated images overlayed on top of the real world. Third is the positioning system. The system allows a network of computers to know physically where other computers are, both in realtion to the world and to the other computer. Fourth is the input device. This is so that users can interact with the system in a fashion that is similar to how they would interact with the real world. Finally, there is a network system that transfers the communications between two or more systems and tracks the systems.
As we kept talking to the advisor, he saw more of the depth of research that we had looked into on this project.
We are working on the shoulders of giants. We are using research from other projects that have lead the way to this idea. The largest amount of research we must give credit to is the AR Quake team at the University of South Australia. Their AR Quake project starts to build the idea of augmented reality first person shooter video games. Using this research will cut our research time in half as most of the theorectical process has been doen and leaves us with the implementation. There have also been many advances in the AR field since AR Quake and multiple different resources to create AR images through simple computer graphics.
We dived into how simple we could go with the project.
Building the system from off the shelf parts is the best choice for the time line of this project. Video output display is already given to us to use in the form of the laptop displays. However, if funds are available, the project might upgrade to a set of AR glasses to increase the ease of use for potential users. Video input display is a simple task of attaching a camera to the computer, most likely, and cheaply, in the form of a simple web cam. The positioning system is a trickery issue. Normal GPSs are not the most accurate, being off by a couple of meter, an inaccuracy too great for this style of video game. Normal GPSs also do not have a compass to tell them which direction they are pointing to. Luckily, there are some GPSs that communicate with a ground tower to get them accurate within a couple of centimeters and also have a magnetic compass system built into them. This would be the most expensive part of the base system. A great input device has already been created, has large amounts of software libraries along with it, and is quite cheap: the Nintendo Wii Remote. The networking portion of the system is simple to do with the laptops' built-in wireless capabilities.
At the end of our meeting with the advisor, he said the one sentence that I was waiting for, that our team could pull this off!
